And for anyone in the SE 9 states who prefers the computer approach merged with the traditional Yellow or White pages look, here is the oddly-hard-to-find url for the definitive site:
It will solve the OP’s Homestead problem, anyway…
–jack
[QUOTE=Will Repair]
Yes you have. In fact you’ve paid for your books and helped pay for all the free ones other people get.
Let me put my previous post another way. The phone company takes part of its profit to distribute books to paying customers and to COCs and libraries. It does not normally mail books on demand. But it will (and always has) mail one on demand for what it considers a offsetting fee. The fee is for doing what it normally does not do, specific mailing.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not too sure what you mean by “The phone company takes part of its profit…” As I’ve noted a number of times, the phone books themselves, because of advertising sales, are profitable, some wildly so, and therefore do not act as a cost burden on the phone/data revenue streams (the way a tech support help-desk is a cost burden to a PC manufacturer). They pay their way, and then some. Trust me: very few people are losing money on phone books. There might be a few unprofitable titles out there, where you have a 10,000 print run over 40,000 sq miles or something (I can think of some Colorado, Texas, and Nevada books like that), but that’s not very common.
Books going to libraries, etc are already factored into the cost basis of the production run itself and does not affect profitability (at least, not to the extent you’re implying).
And RBOC’s mail books all the time - it’s called “secondary distribution” and involves mailing a new phone book to every subscriber to the local calling services.
Though it is true that most publisher’s don’t distribute their own books, rather vending it out. However, this is a cost of doing business and distribution costs are factored into those profit margins I listed above.